[Python-Dev] setuptools: past, present, future (original) (raw)

Giovanni Bajo rasky at develer.com
Sat Apr 22 06:39:07 CEST 2006

Phillip J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:

What should happen now instead, is a plan for merging setuptools into the distutils for 2.6. That includes making the decisions about what "install" and "sdist" should do, and whether backward compatibility of internal behaviors should be implicit or explicit.

+1.

Between 2.5 and 2.6, setuptools should continue to be developed in the sandbox, and keep the name 'setuptools'. For 2.6, however, we should merge the code bases and have setuptools just be an alias. Or, perhaps what is now called setuptools should be called "distutils2" and distributed as such, with "setuptools" only being a legacy name. But regardless, the plan should be to have only one codebase for 2.6, and to issue backported releases of that codebase for at least Python 2.4 and 2.5.

+1.

One final item that is a possibility: we could leave pkgresources in for 2.5, and add its documentation. This would allow people to begin using its API to check for installed packages, accessing resources, etc. I'd be interested in hearing folks' opinions about that, one way or the other.

This would be good. I believe pkg_resources is useful in 2.5 and in no way it represents a not properly integrated layer of additional functionalities (like setuptools is to distutils now). If you sincerely believe that pkg_resources' API is mature enough, I don't see any reason for keeping it off 2.5.

Thanks for your hard work!

Giovanni Bajo

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